Environmental political theorist David Schlosberg joined the University of Helsinki in September, holding a joint professorship on environmental politics between two faculties.
arrived in Helsinki after three decades of work in the United States, the United Kingdom and, for the last 15 years, Australia. In Finland he continues his work on environmental politics in the Faculty of Biological and Environmental Sciences and the Faculty of Social Sciences.
A pluralist framework for environmental justice
Schlosberg describes himself as part environmental political theorist, part empirical environmental social scientist. He is best known for a framework for understanding environmental and climate justice that he first published more than 25 years ago.
"I have long argued for a pluralistic approach to justice which encompasses the most common focus on equity and distributive justice, but also recognition and epistemic justice, participation and procedural justice, and capabilities and basic individual and community needs," he says.
The framework has become a standard reference point in the field of environmental politics and has been applied to thousands of cases of environmental, climate and energy injustice around the world. It has also fed into related work on energy justice, food justice, just transition and just adaptation.
Over the past decade, Schlosberg has extended the same reasoning beyond individual human beings to broader communities, including non-human ones. Together with Professor Dany Celermajer and others, he co-founded what is known as the Multispecies Justice Collective.
"There, we have established the concept and field of multispecies justice, with implications again for both academic theory and everyday political practice," he says.
Bringing democracy into the climate response
Schlosberg's scholarship has helped shape how justice is discussed in international climate policy. His work has informed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's definition of just adaptation and the OECD's analysis of justice in environmental policy, and it has been cited in numerous policy documents across the globe.
In Australia, that research fed directly into practice. Schlosberg led a deliberative community engagement process during the development of the City of Sydney's adaptation policy, carried out community-based research on the impacts of climate shocks for Resilient Sydney, and studied how disasters affect community resilience and organising.
"I have worked with numerous government agencies, NGOs, thinktanks, and industry on issues of justice in environmental, climate, and adaptation policy. I look forward to doing similar work here in Finland and the EU," he says.
At Helsinki, this strand of his work continues in a new project on democratic responses to what he calls climate turbulence.
"There are some clear attacks on democracy growing globally, and a potential crisis about the legitimacy of democracy itself, crucially interlinked with the climate crisis. But my empirical work, and that of a lot of other environmental social scientists, illustrates extensive democratic organizing happening globally in the face of climate change, much of it very local," Schlosberg says.
"What I want to do is to examine the variety of these efforts, understand where and when they work, and for whom, and build both a typology and a community of academics and practitioners schooled in real, effective, democratic responses to climate turbulence."
Schlosberg is not new to Helsinki. In 2024 he held the Erkko Visiting Professorship of Contemporary Society at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, after earlier visiting appointments at the LSE and Princeton.
"I started my PhD over 35 years ago, when the field of environmental politics was still nascent and political theory was less than enthusiastic about considerations of environment and nature. Now we have vital subfields, welcoming journals, and incredibly active young scholars," he says.
Return to research
Schlosberg has been recruited to the University of Helsinki through profile-building (Profi) funding from the Research Council of Finland. This funding supports and accelerates the of Finnish universities to enhance research quality. The latest allocation funds the recruitment of researchers from abroad.
Schlosberg is very happy that his new professorship is shared between the Faculty of Biological and Environmental Sciences and the Faculty of Social Sciences.
"There are just so many possibilities for collaborative work across disciplines, that's really what fascinates me. Given that research on sustainability, broadly defined, is one of the top research areas of the university, I'm looking forward to putting a small team together to contribute to work on how to live both more sustainably and more democratically in relation to the planet, and linking that team to others across the faculties," he says.
The move also marks a shift back to research after more than a decade running the Sydney Environment Institute. "I've been in an administrative position the last 12 years or so, balancing my own research with running a university-wide environment institute. I'm really looking forward to a break from admin, focusing primarily on research again, and bringing that research to students in the multidisciplinary sustainability degrees here at Helsinki."
Outside work, Schlosberg and his wife are hoping to explore Finland's art, food and outdoor life, including a pastime he has so far mostly watched from the shore. "My wife enjoys cold swimming, and while I usually prefer to just sit and enjoy the views, I've promised to start joining her in the water."
